Cesar Chavez bleg

Radley Balko’s post on L.A.P.D chief Daryl Gates got me thinking about this first, and then Steve’s recent essay nudged me into making this post. Back in the 90s as a schoolboy I was vaguely aware that there was some crop-picker named Cesar Chavez that proggles were trying to push as a mini-MLK figure, but it completely failed as Americans find Hispanics & the labor movement less interesting than blacks & the civil rights movement. Later on I heard that SWAT was originally formed in response to Chavez’ UFW, which surprised me. I hadn’t heard of them engaging in any activities that would inspire the use of SWAT (just the grape/raising boycott, I suppose because middle class white people could participate in solidarity). I’ve tried googling for accounts of what was going on back then, but haven’t found anything. So does anyone know what actual operations that original SWAT team undertook with regard to the UFW?

In a completely unrelated bleg, before my hard-drive failed I had a very long (I think more than half an hour) live version of Mountain’s “Nantucket Sleighride” on it. I can’t remember what album it was from. If it’s any help (since there are apparently a ton of them), I remember Leslie West(?) loudly sayig “Corky Laing” before the long drum solo. That makes me assume it wasn’t “Twin Peaks” or any other album from when Laing was gone, but maybe I’m wrong. Also, as an almost OCD tick, I decided I should have one song from each of the three famous lead guitarists in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. I’ve got “Hideaway” featuring Eric Clapton & “The Supernatural” with Peter Green, but don’t know which to choose with Mick Taylor. Recommendations welcome.

Share this:

Like this:

Related

11 Responses to “Cesar Chavez bleg”

Chavez is not a minor figure in areas with a significant Hispanic population, like San Francisco (which named a major street after him — formerly Army Street, so you can read the politics pretty clearly).

I didn’t know about the relation of the UFW and SWAT, but it doesn’t surprise me, and shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with the history of labor relations in the US. Workers organize, and the combined forces of state and capital employ violence to stop them, often resulting in escalating conflict and violence from both sides.

San Francisco also named a street after Fidel Castro, and many of its leading politicians turned out in support for Jim Jones when initial allegations were flying.

There is a history of battles between police and labor unions, mostly preceding the Taft-Hartley era that Kevin Carson perceives as having neutered the labor movement. But SWAT is typically associated with a small strike-team using the element of surprise to defuse a situation (usually involving a small number of specific targets) with overwhelming force, with Charles Whitman being a notable pre-SWAT case. Riot squads or other large presences of police manpower seem more relevant to dealing with strikers. Snipers certainly don’t seem relevant in that case, but they were supposed to have been an important part of the founding vision of SWAT.

I also associate police-labor battles with urban/industrial contexts. A factory can be seized and held as a somewhat defensible position, can a grape field?

You’re joking, right? “Castro Street was named for José Castro (1808–1860), a leader of Mexican opposition to U.S. rule in California in the 19th century, and governor of Alta California from 1835-1836.” (Wikipedia)

At any rate, I don’t see what your opinion of San Francisco politics has to do with the point of your post. You wanted to know what the status of Chavez was, I told you. Contrary to Palinist doctrine, San Francisco is just as much a part of the United States as Indianapolis or Tulsa.

Re argicultural labor organizing, didn’t they make you read The Grapes of Wrath in school? The socialist grip on the education system must be slipping.

It’s true that SWAT teams and agriculture seem an odd mix, but why do you expect states to act rationally? Clearly the UFW’s activism just provided an excuse for stepping up the level of police militarism.

From what I read, there were fears that the 1965 grape workers’ strike that lead to the creation of the UFW would turn violent, but that didn’t happen. One interesting bit of trivia about the strike is that the workers were Filipino rather than Mexican.

Something that’s often been forgotten about the Arizona-born Cesar Chavez is that he was strongly opposed to immigration.

SWAT teams in deep blue Maryland:http://seasonsoftumultanddiscord.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/the-modern-police-state/Over the last six months of 2009, SWAT teams were deployed 804 times in the state of Maryland, or about 4.5 times per day. In Prince George’s County alone, with its 850,000 residents, a SWAT team was deployed about once per day. According to a Baltimore Sun analysis, 94 percent of the state’s SWAT deployments were used to serve search or arrest warrants, leaving just 6 percent in response to the kinds of barricades, bank robberies, hostage takings, and emergency situations for which SWAT teams were originally intended.

Worse even than those dreary numbers is the fact that more than half of the county’s SWAT deployments were for misdemeanors and nonserious felonies. That means more than 100 times last year Prince George’s County brought state-sanctioned violence to confront people suspected of nonviolent crimes. And that’s just one county in Maryland. These outrageous numbers should provide a long-overdue wake-up call to public officials about how far the pendulum has swung toward institutionalized police brutality against its citizenry, usually in the name of the drug war.
(…)

When it comes to Klanspersons, the Constitution is relegated to the outhouse and hardly anyone notices:http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/lofiversion/index.php/t11464.html
(…)Chief Gunn’s anti-Klan ‘black squad,’ set off small explosions near Klansmen’s houses and shot into their homes. Alton Wayne Roberts, free on bail for the 1964 Neshoba murders, and his brother Raymond, Chair of the local National States Rights Party chapter, turned informant after Meridian police fired into Raymond’s house.[195]
(…)[234] The aggressive, extralegal actions of the Jackson police, should also be mentioned in this context.

No need for martial law, just have the cops act like the Mafia:http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=729
(…)But what happened behind the scenes, Nelson asserts, is that the FBI used illegal tactics to set up an ambush with the intention of executing the Klan members on the spot.

FBI informants played a crucial role not only in ascertaining the identities of those responsible for the Mississippi bombings, but in convincing them to target a Jewish businessman’s home for the next hit and thereby entrapping them. Nelson claims that payoffs and physical threats were used to coerce the informants, and the account he gives is spine chilling and convincing. Even the participants in these events who later disapproved of Nelson’s revelations admit that desperate times called for desperate measures and that the only way FBI and local law enforcement could deal effectively with the Klan was by using the toughest means (p. 235). Informants were not given a choice of cooperating with the FBI; their lives were threatened if they refused. Nelson neither downplays this nor exaggerates. He methodically shows his readers that coercion played a pivotal role in breaking the Klan stronghold in the South.
(…)

Whoops. I guess I was mislead by that episode of the Simpsons where Fidel Castro says “They named a street after me”.

Blue America isn’t chopped liver, but San Francisco is exceptionally weird. I think even most San Franciscans would agree.

I didn’t have to read Grapes of Wrath, though I did have to read actual commies like Richard Wright. I heard but can’t verify that Steinbeck himself wrote a letter to his daughter’s school when they required her to read the book, disagreeing with their decision!

My recollection from Balko is that SWAT was not initially used for standard operations like serving warrants on drug offenders. The drug war and fear of “superpredators” seems more liked to police militarization.

ironrailsironweights:
I did not know about the Filipino workers. MAD TV lied to me!

You’re right, southern blacks are more culturally successful than southwestern mexicans, and it’s interesting. The labor/civil rights thing is less surprising, it’s a standard talented elite victory it seems to me (dumb people are going to stay laborers, they’re not going to become elite capitalists). It seems to me like a coordination failure of lifestyle elites and society as a whole whenever labor wins over weird but valuable minorities, to the degree the two are in competition such as comparing the prestige of labor and non-laboring “civil rights” minorities.

Did southern blacks become “elite capitalists”? I think the poverty rate is actually lower among hispanics.

Possibly of interest, but in the second paragraph of this page from Radical Chich there are a list of causes considered similarly fashionable to the black panthers, with grape workers being among them. Despite being Irish, I had never actually heard of Bernadette Devlin before that. G. I. Coffee Shops either, but I’m not much for coffee.